[Kora]
He says her name quietly, softly, pulling it back into her throat and reaches for her slowly, wary of what might happen next. Her moon is in the sky, close to its zenith, waxing slowly toward the full. Her reaches for her, tracing his fingers up the back of her arm. The hoodie is loose, the zipper that bisects it hanging open, the cotton is soft, woven in shifts shades of blue and gray that blend into the darkness and never quite match her eyes. He reaches for her, and she's already got one foot up on the back of the retaining wall, turning back toward him as he reaches for her, as his hand finds her shoulder at last, and he begins kneading the knots out of the long slope of her neck and shoulder with the slow work of his firm fingers.
Her eyes close briefly, her open features momentarily taut, constricted with this unfamiliar sort of glottal pain that sticks in her chest, underneath her heart, and closes her throat.
When she opens her eyes, they are - not clear, precisely, just shining, and the look she gives him is raw and unreserved. "I know."
She meets his eyes so directly, it both reveals and belies the turmoil inside her.
Swinging her left leg after her right, she turns all the way around, facing him at last. The lake is open behind her, dark except where it glitters with reflected city lights.
"My father was Garou," she tells him. "I don't know his name. He was just a cliath, and he died before my mother knew she was pregnant. So she left, and then - she just stayed away. I didn't know what I was until my first change. Linus, his father came for him later - but me -
"I just want him to know. Or her. I don't want to be nameless.
"So sometimes - " she's leaning toward him, but maintaining a certain distance, her knees sharp between their bodies. There's a faint grimace as she considers and discards whatever she was going to tell him. He can still see her pulse in her throat. In the aftermath of the rage spike she feels briefly raw, spent - but it is there too, underneath her skin, warming her flesh despite the cool night, as if she were fevered.
It is his strength she likes best, that steel at the core of him.
"Whatever else happens, I believe in you. I wouldn't - do this if I didn't."
[Trent Brumby] "I'm sorry, Kora," for her pain. For nothing that he did, certainly, as he's not to blame for those in her past, but he's sorry that she feels the suffering that she has and the confusion that must have come at that terrifying part of her life.
He thinks then, if only briefly, that she should come and meet his folks. They are so very different to the life that she tells him about, in snippets here and there. He's known all his life what he is and his role in society. Even if he'd lived on the fringes of it, never in the middle - until now, he's always known about the bigger picture. He's known his ancestors and what it all means.
Slipping his hand back down from her shoulder, he follows her arm down to her hand. "They will know," he promises her with this steady toned voice and direct gaze, "all about you. From the way you laugh, to the way you fight, and the way your voice sounds when recounting stories in the early hours of the morning."
"They will know who you are. And they will know this while you are here with us, and when you are gone." Taking up her fingers, he raises her hand up towards his mouth, stepping in closer to close that distance between them. "I promise you will not be forgotten." He kisses her knuckles while watching her eyes.
[Kora] Her knuckles are white against his mouth. She has that stillness to her again, that promise of movement, which seems liminal around her, the way heat shapes itself around a still flame. That sense of - movement, of expansion - which opens around the heart of it, like an oily stain against the air.
The edge of her mouth hooks upward, this half-remembered smile that aches with the echo of her rage, the sheen of it behind her skin and in her eyes. He follows the shape of her arm, his fingers underneath her skin. At the elbow, at the wrist, he can feel the shadow of her bones. He knows their shape without looking, and how his fingers curve around them. The park is still now, cooler than it should be, and dark. There's a promise of rain in the air, and beneath it a promise of winter.
She smiles at him, unblinking as he steps in closer to her, as he lifts her knuckles to his mouth, as his mouth moves over them, and his warm breath flares over her skin.
"You don't have to apologize," she says, low. Because it is true. He's not responsible for any of her remembered pain, and pain is simply the fire in which Get of Fenris are forged. How quickly she has gone from that moment of stark outrage to this, quiet-voiced serious girl-wolf. She opens her hand underneath his mouth, turns over hand against his lips, splays her fingers out over his gruff cheeks, the familiar bristle of his whiskers, dark against his olive skin. "I'm not on the hook with that. You know? I made it through. I don't - live there, I found my way, just like you did. And I'm glad I'm here."
He says, they will know and she - shining eyed, her hair, in this light, the color of the sun in first morning - is at away in this dark, churning sea. Half-feral, half-human, hungry for him. Not sex, not precisely - though that spark of desire gets submerged with the rest of it.
The moon is in her throat, in her heart. He's in her flaring nostrils. She opens her body to him as he steps closer, her arms and her legs, shifting her perch on the retaining wall, looking down at him as she reaches to pull his cheek close to her mouth, to graze his jaw with her teeth.
"Maybe you should keep texting me," she says, her eyes low, tracing the line of his chair, against the background of trees, lost to focus. Hunger, beneath. " - after this, I think I want ice cream."
[Trent Brumby] Tilting his head has his jaw offered to her teeth, and he's acutely aware of how they seem sharper in times like this, but still doesn't shy from them. The graze across soft bristles of hair and the heat of her breath stirs him quietly. He's left his hand down to the outside of her thighs, fitting between her knees without pushing into her, standing instead, solid and tall before her.
Over her should he can see the darkness of the lake, her hair lighter against the shadow, with the curve of her ear and the length of her neck. Trailing his hands along the outside of her legs, he reaches her hips and slides his fingers back down towards the outside of her knees again.
"Let's go and get you some ice-cream then," he says quietly, easily.
[Kora] "I was going to see if you wanted to go see a band," she says, laughing against his skin, the thrum of her voice in her body, the promise of fall in the air, the darkness of the lake behind her. " - I saw a flyer for them on the steet, the corner of Wilson and Roosevelt, yeah? I saw them before," the shift of musing is not distant, there's that awareness underneath, the hint of power in her body, the scrim of memory. " - in Edinburgh I think."
He lifts his jaw, offering her his flesh, and his bare throat beneath in a way that sends a delicate little thrill of awareness sparkling down her spine, like water. Her hands fall back from his body, to the edge of the retaining wall, and then she leverages herself down, close enough into his space so that she can feel his body heat, giving him that familiar, lively little hip bump before she falls into step beside him. " - but I think I'm going to have a hard time not-drinking in a bar, so ice cream instead. Maybe gelato. Hopefully hazelnut."
[Trent Brumby] Stepping back, his hands fall from her to let her get up. She bumps him with her hip, making him smile quietly, before he moves into step with her. "Gelato and hazelnut," he muses, "at least it's not gherkins dipped in peanut butter." Sliding a hand into his pocket, opposite to where she's standing, he walks along at her pace and keeps an eye out on the surrounds now that they're on the move.
That she can't go to a band and drink, something that she likes to do, has him trying to figure out how they can do that without tempting her into drinking and upsetting the pregnancy. It bothers him that she can't go and do a few things she likes to. She deserves these simple pleasures. "What about ice-cream and a foot and body rub?" All girls like that.
[Kora] "I'm going to eat pickles dipped in peanut butter?" she returns, this quiet edge still in her voice. It's the moon in the sky, the shadows around them. The last time she was in the park, a two-headed dog attacked from the bushes, something changed and wrong, infected by the grotesqueries of the worl in which they live. He's watchful, and she's alive, they're a bright couple against the darkness, a direct challenge to the broken world.
"You didn't tell me I was going to eat pickles dipped in peanut butter." There's that shadow of grievance there, in the inflections of her voice, in the way it shapes itself around the words. All he has to do is glance at her, sidelong, to see the way her mouth curves back against laughter underneath, not hysterical, just sort of still. "That's not fair, baby. I think you should have a disclaimer, you know - " and it's a way to still the fluttering under her ribs when she thinks about it as girl, as Kora, not as wolf, as mate. " - a warning. Like on cigarette packs. But instead of suing you, I'll take the foot and body rub as an installment on the payment plan."
[Trent Brumby] Of course he did look at her when she seemed to be irate at the idea of having to eat that mix of food. But glancing to her, found that she was amused. It makes him huff at her softly, shaking his head with a curl of his own mouth when he looks away again. "I do recall that I've never jumped your bones, Miss Kora," he teases her back, "self inflicted, this ailment of yours."
Reaching out, he finds her hand to take it in his, loose and not in some solid grip. "But the rubs are yours, anytime you want them." He manages to make it not sound sexual, even if he doesn't mind laying his hands all over her. Trent is able to distinguish between those sort of rubs and ones to make her muscles properly relaxed until she feels like jello.
[Kora] "I know," she tells him evenly, levelly, her chin high but still, her profile a sharp line against the dark trees that now surround them, as the path they follow shifts from the lakeshore through the still-green copses planted in memory of the forests that once covered these shores, in time before time. Her hand is warm in his, her touch loose. Her bones are finer than his, her skin warming, but when she squeezes his hand to punctuate that I know he can feel her strength again. It goes past human, the strength in that squeeze, as if she did not know her own strength. " - but I can still credit you."
Or knew that he could take it.
"For tempting me to distraction, yeah? It was the split lip that did it, you know?" All those nights ago. "And the swollen knuckles. Fucking hot."
Tonight the trees are dark, the wind whispers through the crowns of the trees. Her hoodie is open, the zipper loose, this quiet metal sound as it rattles against the teeth. Tonight, there's nothing inside the shadows except for shadows. Another night, and they could be fighting for their lives. Another night, another life.
It doesn't matter, they have this one.
---
Later, after hazelnut gelato and a long walk, she'll take him up on those offers. Let him work her muscles boneless, her eyes closed, the moon behind her eyes. Thoughtless and mindless and quiet. Some other night, she'll fight and bleed. Some other night, the shadows will move with more than the wind in the leaves.
Tonight, though, the walk is lingering rather than lean, quiet except for the banter, except where the moon burns in the back of her throat.
"Have you told your folks yet?" - she asks him, later, her eyes on his face when she asks.
[Trent Brumby] Laughed, he did, when she mentions the split lip and the swollen knuckles and just how she found those. "I'll keep that in mind," he murmured, bemused. More fights he needs to get into, just less that ends with him pumped full of drugs and useless for weeks.
--
Later, he got himself an ice cream and ate with her. While hers is hazelnut gelato his had been a mix of banana and chocolate, a rare indulgence. Trent isn't much of a sweet tooth, as it was, he was left with the sickening sugar on the back of his tongue. The flavours rich and sharp.
Looking at him, she finds the quick raise of his brows and a sharp inhale of silent breath through his nose at the mention of his folks and the baby. His tongue darts out, tastes his lower lip, and his shoulders hunch as he finds a hand into his pocket again. Subtle things. "Not yet," he confirms what his body language tells her. "I haven't told anyone." Though he had really, really wanted to. It's hard to imagine that he's managed to keep his mouth shut considering how happy he's been.
[Kora] She breathes in thouh her noses, her eyes lingering on him, the richness of the ice cream strong in the back of her throat, on her tongue. The gelato shop is open late, harsh lights spilling onto the sidewalk, a handful of tabes inside taken up by strangers, other couples, a mother and daughter together despite the late hour. No one lingers close to them, not on a night like this, and the moon means she cannot live long under such lights without wanting to zipper her way out of her skin.
So they eat outside, the cool night, some brickfronted street where she doesn't belong. Her eyes are shadows; the shift of her glance clear more in the movement of her head, the drop of her chin, the faint angle at which she holds her head. "I haven't, either," told anyone, she's quiet, and that's implied. She's likely to let them figure it out, really. She cannot imagine the conversation with her pack; and harder to imagine still, with her tribe. " - but I think you should. Tell them, you know? Your folks." Abruptly, she reaches for his hand, uses the leverage to pull herself closer to him. "I think that's a good place to start."
[Kora] transcript!
to Kora
[Kora] She breathes in through her nose, her eyes lingering on him, the richness of the ice cream strong in the back of her throat, on her tongue. The gelato shop is open late, harsh lights spilling onto the sidewalk, a handful of tables inside taken up by strangers, other couples, a mother and daughter together despite the late hour. No one lingers close to them, not on a night like this, and the moon means she cannot live long under such lights without wanting to zipper her way out of her skin.
So they eat outside, the cool night, some brickfronted street where she doesn't belong. Her eyes are shadows; the shift of her glance clear more in the movement of her head, the drop of her chin, the faint angle at which she holds her head. "I haven't, either," told anyone, she's quiet, and that's implied. She's likely to let them figure it out, really. She cannot imagine the conversation with her pack; and harder to imagine still, with her tribe. " - but I think you should. Tell them, you know? Your folks." Abruptly, she reaches for his hand, uses the leverage to pull herself closer to him. "I think that's a good place to start."
He says her name quietly, softly, pulling it back into her throat and reaches for her slowly, wary of what might happen next. Her moon is in the sky, close to its zenith, waxing slowly toward the full. Her reaches for her, tracing his fingers up the back of her arm. The hoodie is loose, the zipper that bisects it hanging open, the cotton is soft, woven in shifts shades of blue and gray that blend into the darkness and never quite match her eyes. He reaches for her, and she's already got one foot up on the back of the retaining wall, turning back toward him as he reaches for her, as his hand finds her shoulder at last, and he begins kneading the knots out of the long slope of her neck and shoulder with the slow work of his firm fingers.
Her eyes close briefly, her open features momentarily taut, constricted with this unfamiliar sort of glottal pain that sticks in her chest, underneath her heart, and closes her throat.
When she opens her eyes, they are - not clear, precisely, just shining, and the look she gives him is raw and unreserved. "I know."
She meets his eyes so directly, it both reveals and belies the turmoil inside her.
Swinging her left leg after her right, she turns all the way around, facing him at last. The lake is open behind her, dark except where it glitters with reflected city lights.
"My father was Garou," she tells him. "I don't know his name. He was just a cliath, and he died before my mother knew she was pregnant. So she left, and then - she just stayed away. I didn't know what I was until my first change. Linus, his father came for him later - but me -
"I just want him to know. Or her. I don't want to be nameless.
"So sometimes - " she's leaning toward him, but maintaining a certain distance, her knees sharp between their bodies. There's a faint grimace as she considers and discards whatever she was going to tell him. He can still see her pulse in her throat. In the aftermath of the rage spike she feels briefly raw, spent - but it is there too, underneath her skin, warming her flesh despite the cool night, as if she were fevered.
It is his strength she likes best, that steel at the core of him.
"Whatever else happens, I believe in you. I wouldn't - do this if I didn't."
[Trent Brumby] "I'm sorry, Kora," for her pain. For nothing that he did, certainly, as he's not to blame for those in her past, but he's sorry that she feels the suffering that she has and the confusion that must have come at that terrifying part of her life.
He thinks then, if only briefly, that she should come and meet his folks. They are so very different to the life that she tells him about, in snippets here and there. He's known all his life what he is and his role in society. Even if he'd lived on the fringes of it, never in the middle - until now, he's always known about the bigger picture. He's known his ancestors and what it all means.
Slipping his hand back down from her shoulder, he follows her arm down to her hand. "They will know," he promises her with this steady toned voice and direct gaze, "all about you. From the way you laugh, to the way you fight, and the way your voice sounds when recounting stories in the early hours of the morning."
"They will know who you are. And they will know this while you are here with us, and when you are gone." Taking up her fingers, he raises her hand up towards his mouth, stepping in closer to close that distance between them. "I promise you will not be forgotten." He kisses her knuckles while watching her eyes.
[Kora] Her knuckles are white against his mouth. She has that stillness to her again, that promise of movement, which seems liminal around her, the way heat shapes itself around a still flame. That sense of - movement, of expansion - which opens around the heart of it, like an oily stain against the air.
The edge of her mouth hooks upward, this half-remembered smile that aches with the echo of her rage, the sheen of it behind her skin and in her eyes. He follows the shape of her arm, his fingers underneath her skin. At the elbow, at the wrist, he can feel the shadow of her bones. He knows their shape without looking, and how his fingers curve around them. The park is still now, cooler than it should be, and dark. There's a promise of rain in the air, and beneath it a promise of winter.
She smiles at him, unblinking as he steps in closer to her, as he lifts her knuckles to his mouth, as his mouth moves over them, and his warm breath flares over her skin.
"You don't have to apologize," she says, low. Because it is true. He's not responsible for any of her remembered pain, and pain is simply the fire in which Get of Fenris are forged. How quickly she has gone from that moment of stark outrage to this, quiet-voiced serious girl-wolf. She opens her hand underneath his mouth, turns over hand against his lips, splays her fingers out over his gruff cheeks, the familiar bristle of his whiskers, dark against his olive skin. "I'm not on the hook with that. You know? I made it through. I don't - live there, I found my way, just like you did. And I'm glad I'm here."
He says, they will know and she - shining eyed, her hair, in this light, the color of the sun in first morning - is at away in this dark, churning sea. Half-feral, half-human, hungry for him. Not sex, not precisely - though that spark of desire gets submerged with the rest of it.
The moon is in her throat, in her heart. He's in her flaring nostrils. She opens her body to him as he steps closer, her arms and her legs, shifting her perch on the retaining wall, looking down at him as she reaches to pull his cheek close to her mouth, to graze his jaw with her teeth.
"Maybe you should keep texting me," she says, her eyes low, tracing the line of his chair, against the background of trees, lost to focus. Hunger, beneath. " - after this, I think I want ice cream."
[Trent Brumby] Tilting his head has his jaw offered to her teeth, and he's acutely aware of how they seem sharper in times like this, but still doesn't shy from them. The graze across soft bristles of hair and the heat of her breath stirs him quietly. He's left his hand down to the outside of her thighs, fitting between her knees without pushing into her, standing instead, solid and tall before her.
Over her should he can see the darkness of the lake, her hair lighter against the shadow, with the curve of her ear and the length of her neck. Trailing his hands along the outside of her legs, he reaches her hips and slides his fingers back down towards the outside of her knees again.
"Let's go and get you some ice-cream then," he says quietly, easily.
[Kora] "I was going to see if you wanted to go see a band," she says, laughing against his skin, the thrum of her voice in her body, the promise of fall in the air, the darkness of the lake behind her. " - I saw a flyer for them on the steet, the corner of Wilson and Roosevelt, yeah? I saw them before," the shift of musing is not distant, there's that awareness underneath, the hint of power in her body, the scrim of memory. " - in Edinburgh I think."
He lifts his jaw, offering her his flesh, and his bare throat beneath in a way that sends a delicate little thrill of awareness sparkling down her spine, like water. Her hands fall back from his body, to the edge of the retaining wall, and then she leverages herself down, close enough into his space so that she can feel his body heat, giving him that familiar, lively little hip bump before she falls into step beside him. " - but I think I'm going to have a hard time not-drinking in a bar, so ice cream instead. Maybe gelato. Hopefully hazelnut."
[Trent Brumby] Stepping back, his hands fall from her to let her get up. She bumps him with her hip, making him smile quietly, before he moves into step with her. "Gelato and hazelnut," he muses, "at least it's not gherkins dipped in peanut butter." Sliding a hand into his pocket, opposite to where she's standing, he walks along at her pace and keeps an eye out on the surrounds now that they're on the move.
That she can't go to a band and drink, something that she likes to do, has him trying to figure out how they can do that without tempting her into drinking and upsetting the pregnancy. It bothers him that she can't go and do a few things she likes to. She deserves these simple pleasures. "What about ice-cream and a foot and body rub?" All girls like that.
[Kora] "I'm going to eat pickles dipped in peanut butter?" she returns, this quiet edge still in her voice. It's the moon in the sky, the shadows around them. The last time she was in the park, a two-headed dog attacked from the bushes, something changed and wrong, infected by the grotesqueries of the worl in which they live. He's watchful, and she's alive, they're a bright couple against the darkness, a direct challenge to the broken world.
"You didn't tell me I was going to eat pickles dipped in peanut butter." There's that shadow of grievance there, in the inflections of her voice, in the way it shapes itself around the words. All he has to do is glance at her, sidelong, to see the way her mouth curves back against laughter underneath, not hysterical, just sort of still. "That's not fair, baby. I think you should have a disclaimer, you know - " and it's a way to still the fluttering under her ribs when she thinks about it as girl, as Kora, not as wolf, as mate. " - a warning. Like on cigarette packs. But instead of suing you, I'll take the foot and body rub as an installment on the payment plan."
[Trent Brumby] Of course he did look at her when she seemed to be irate at the idea of having to eat that mix of food. But glancing to her, found that she was amused. It makes him huff at her softly, shaking his head with a curl of his own mouth when he looks away again. "I do recall that I've never jumped your bones, Miss Kora," he teases her back, "self inflicted, this ailment of yours."
Reaching out, he finds her hand to take it in his, loose and not in some solid grip. "But the rubs are yours, anytime you want them." He manages to make it not sound sexual, even if he doesn't mind laying his hands all over her. Trent is able to distinguish between those sort of rubs and ones to make her muscles properly relaxed until she feels like jello.
[Kora] "I know," she tells him evenly, levelly, her chin high but still, her profile a sharp line against the dark trees that now surround them, as the path they follow shifts from the lakeshore through the still-green copses planted in memory of the forests that once covered these shores, in time before time. Her hand is warm in his, her touch loose. Her bones are finer than his, her skin warming, but when she squeezes his hand to punctuate that I know he can feel her strength again. It goes past human, the strength in that squeeze, as if she did not know her own strength. " - but I can still credit you."
Or knew that he could take it.
"For tempting me to distraction, yeah? It was the split lip that did it, you know?" All those nights ago. "And the swollen knuckles. Fucking hot."
Tonight the trees are dark, the wind whispers through the crowns of the trees. Her hoodie is open, the zipper loose, this quiet metal sound as it rattles against the teeth. Tonight, there's nothing inside the shadows except for shadows. Another night, and they could be fighting for their lives. Another night, another life.
It doesn't matter, they have this one.
---
Later, after hazelnut gelato and a long walk, she'll take him up on those offers. Let him work her muscles boneless, her eyes closed, the moon behind her eyes. Thoughtless and mindless and quiet. Some other night, she'll fight and bleed. Some other night, the shadows will move with more than the wind in the leaves.
Tonight, though, the walk is lingering rather than lean, quiet except for the banter, except where the moon burns in the back of her throat.
"Have you told your folks yet?" - she asks him, later, her eyes on his face when she asks.
[Trent Brumby] Laughed, he did, when she mentions the split lip and the swollen knuckles and just how she found those. "I'll keep that in mind," he murmured, bemused. More fights he needs to get into, just less that ends with him pumped full of drugs and useless for weeks.
--
Later, he got himself an ice cream and ate with her. While hers is hazelnut gelato his had been a mix of banana and chocolate, a rare indulgence. Trent isn't much of a sweet tooth, as it was, he was left with the sickening sugar on the back of his tongue. The flavours rich and sharp.
Looking at him, she finds the quick raise of his brows and a sharp inhale of silent breath through his nose at the mention of his folks and the baby. His tongue darts out, tastes his lower lip, and his shoulders hunch as he finds a hand into his pocket again. Subtle things. "Not yet," he confirms what his body language tells her. "I haven't told anyone." Though he had really, really wanted to. It's hard to imagine that he's managed to keep his mouth shut considering how happy he's been.
[Kora] She breathes in thouh her noses, her eyes lingering on him, the richness of the ice cream strong in the back of her throat, on her tongue. The gelato shop is open late, harsh lights spilling onto the sidewalk, a handful of tabes inside taken up by strangers, other couples, a mother and daughter together despite the late hour. No one lingers close to them, not on a night like this, and the moon means she cannot live long under such lights without wanting to zipper her way out of her skin.
So they eat outside, the cool night, some brickfronted street where she doesn't belong. Her eyes are shadows; the shift of her glance clear more in the movement of her head, the drop of her chin, the faint angle at which she holds her head. "I haven't, either," told anyone, she's quiet, and that's implied. She's likely to let them figure it out, really. She cannot imagine the conversation with her pack; and harder to imagine still, with her tribe. " - but I think you should. Tell them, you know? Your folks." Abruptly, she reaches for his hand, uses the leverage to pull herself closer to him. "I think that's a good place to start."
[Kora] transcript!
to Kora
[Kora] She breathes in through her nose, her eyes lingering on him, the richness of the ice cream strong in the back of her throat, on her tongue. The gelato shop is open late, harsh lights spilling onto the sidewalk, a handful of tables inside taken up by strangers, other couples, a mother and daughter together despite the late hour. No one lingers close to them, not on a night like this, and the moon means she cannot live long under such lights without wanting to zipper her way out of her skin.
So they eat outside, the cool night, some brickfronted street where she doesn't belong. Her eyes are shadows; the shift of her glance clear more in the movement of her head, the drop of her chin, the faint angle at which she holds her head. "I haven't, either," told anyone, she's quiet, and that's implied. She's likely to let them figure it out, really. She cannot imagine the conversation with her pack; and harder to imagine still, with her tribe. " - but I think you should. Tell them, you know? Your folks." Abruptly, she reaches for his hand, uses the leverage to pull herself closer to him. "I think that's a good place to start."
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